Soon after he began his second term, President Trump — who has referred to global warming as “a make-believe problem” and asked oil executives to contribute $1 billion to his 2024 campaign — issued executive orders expanding coal mining and offshore drilling of oil, blocking enforcement of state and local laws restricting carbon emissions and slashing the budget of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In July, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin moved to rescind the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” that pollutants from burning fossil fuels constitute a threat to public health. Officials indicated that the decision was based in part on a report of five climate contrarians commissioned by the Department of Energy. Committed to ending regulations on automobile emissions, reducing limits on power plant emissions and releases of carbon dioxide and methane, Zeldin denounced “people, who in the name of climate change, are willing to bankrupt the country … and basically regulate out of existence a lot of segments of our economy.”
The Interior Department is now conducting “consultations” that cause lengthy delays on permits for wind and solar projects (which produced 16 percent of U.S. electricity in 2024).
The Trump administration’s assault on what Zeldin called “climate change religion” is based on demonstrably false assumptions and assertions. Global warming is not “a hoax.” Temperatures on the surface of the earth and ocean are increasing at alarming rates. The ice sheets are melting, sea levels are rising and catastrophic weather-related events are more frequent. The benefits of addressing climate change, moreover, outweigh costs to the economies of developed and developing countries — and to the welfare of hundreds of millions of people on the planet.
Hundreds of studies conducted throughout the world confirm that human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, are having an adverse impact on the climate. About 97 percent of climate scientists agree. According to one expert, no new evidence has emerged “that would in any way challenge the scientific bases of the endangerment finding.”
A National Climate Assessment report presents 2,000 pages of evidence that rising temperatures are injurious to health. Research indicates that each increase of a tenth of a degree Celsius moves about 100 million people into “unprecedented heat exposure.” In the U.S., extreme heat already kills more people than any other “natural” disaster.
Bill McKibben reminds us in his new book “Here Comes The Sun” that many factors are often omitted when measuring the economic costs of various energy sources. Consider, for example, insurance. Wildfires, hurricanes and floods have caused many insurance companies to stop offering policies for homes in vulnerable areas. The number of homeowners in the U.S. with no insurance, according to a Senate Budget Committee report, increased from 5 percent in 2019 to 12 percent in 2024. Premiums for Americans lucky enough to get a policy are going up 40 percent faster than inflation.
A British actuarial society estimated a 50 percent loss of global GDP and dramatic declines in “critical services” by 2070 if temperatures continue to rise.
Far from bankrupting the country, solar, wind and battery power now present cost-effective alternatives to fossil fuels. Noting that oil and coal produce wasted heat and send pollutants into the air, McKibben praises renewables as “the Costco of energy, inexpensive and available in bulk.” A solar panel produced in 2024 will generate electricity for decades, whereas oil and gas will have to be replenished every few months.
In 2024, 92.5 percent of new electricity around the world and 96 percent in the U.S. came from carbon-free energy. California is now using 44 percent less natural gas than it used in 2023. “In a red-state cocktail party fact,” McKibben reveals that the largest solar panel factory in the Western Hemisphere is located in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Georgia congressional district. Texas, “the spiritual home of fossil fuel,” will add twice as much clean energy in 2025 than California and Arizona put together.
McKibben also cites evidence that renewables are producing more jobs than the more dangerous and dirty jobs lost in coal, oil and gas industries.
China, it’s worth noting, has seized the moment, and is now “the Saudi Arabia of sun.” By 2024, seven Chinese companies were producing more energy than the oil industry’s once-fabled Seven Sisters. In the last two years, China spent $329 billion on clean technology supply chains, while the U.S. and Europe spent a total of $29 billion. China also dominates the global market for electric vehicles.
America can become a worthy competitor. Polls in 2022 indicated that 70 percent of Americans favored renewables over fossil fuels. But it’s also possible, McKibben acknowledges, that the U.S., with Trump behind the wheel, will slide backwards into an “island of internal combustion” and “global irrelevance.”
McKibben — a sometimes optimist who has written 20 books about climate change — concludes that we have one last chance to stop the increase in global warming and “restart civilization on saner ground, once we’ve extinguished the fires that now both power and threaten it.”
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble,” a saying attributed to Mark Twain goes, “it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” With that in mind, here’s hoping that with a push from better informed American voters and from the rest of the world, the U.S. will do a 180.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
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